Bringing the Amazon to the desert
In 2017, Amazon announced its intent to build a second headquarters, or HQ2, and sent out a request for proposals to communities across North America. Economic development groups and local governments, with a range of budgets, rushed to develop and dispatch proposals. Yet Amazon ultimately selected locations in New York City and Alexandria, Virginia. Although my community, Santa Teresa, New Mexico, was not selected, it developed one of the most creative proposals. (Though I might be a little biased since I helped develop the proposal.)
An unincorporated part of Dona Ana County in the southern part of the state, Santa Teresa is a five-minute drive west of El Paso, where the U.S.-Mexico border is delineated by flat desert, not the Rio Grande. Roughly 22,000 acres, Santa Teresa has become a hub for manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, primarily because of its proximity to Mexico but also because of a New Mexican business climate that is attractive to manufacturing. In recent years, Santa Teresa has experienced the nation’s fastest export growth and is now responsible for half of New Mexico’s total exports.
At my day job, I represent two organizations: the International Business Accelerator (IBA) and the Border Industrial Association (BIA). The IBA is a program of the New Mexico Small Business Development Center Network that provides international trade counseling to New Mexicans and is responsible for increasing the state’s exports. The BIA is a nonprofit organization made up of companies in Santa Teresa that advocates for more development at New Mexico’s border with Mexico.
After hearing about Amazon’s announcement, the office was abuzz with what this could mean for our region and state. We met with our partners at the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance — the economic development organization for Dona Ana County — to discuss whether this was something we should pursue. Although I had a glimmer of hope that we could land Amazon, nobody at the table realistically thought we stood a chance. Other states could prepare much larger incentive packages than New Mexico.
However, we saw another opportunity in Amazon’s request for proposals: the media attention it would generate. We may not bring Amazon to the desert, but if the media picked up our proposal, it might catch the eye of other companies. The question was: What kind of proposal would attract the media’s attention?
Santa Teresa’s most valuable asset is its border with Mexico and our relationship with the community just south of us, San Jeronimo, Chihuahua. Collectively, we refer to ourselves as Los Santos, a reference to the saintly names of our two communities. Los Santos promotes our binational region as a single community that can offer industry the advantages of both sides of the border. Our pitch was to place Amazon’s HQ2 directly on the border and build a cross-border campus to attract talent from both countries.
Our proposal envisioned a campus on the border, surrounded by secure fencing maintained by U.S. and Mexican customs agents. Entering the campus from either the north or south would be similar to passing through a normal border crossing. Once inside the campus, Amazon employees could move freely through a private border crossing, which would be operated by U.S. and Mexican customs agents but funded by Amazon. To leave the campus, employees would return to their original country or, with the proper paperwork, cross to the other country. The campus would create a kind of neutral zone between the U.S. and Mexican borders, where Amazon employees would not have to worry about visas or citizenship.
The opportunity for Amazon would be the ease of recruiting talent from both countries. Amazon had previously announced that it was eyeing growth in Latin America. And what better way to serve that market than by recruiting Mexican employees. Rather than go through the difficulty of the U.S. work visa process, these employees could work at the cross-border campus.
We hired a graphic designer to make a mockup video of the campus. We then built a website around the video and submitted it as our proposal. Total cost: about $600. What was great about the website, versus a traditional hard-copy proposal, was the ease with which we could distribute it to the press. As we had hoped, the media picked up our proposal. Outlets like the Seattle Times, CNN, MSN and Business Insider, among others, covered it. We immediately saw hits on our website from Seattle to the U.K. to Taiwan. In our minds, this was the best $600 we had ever spent. We were proud that the world was noticing our community.
Although Amazon didn’t select our proposal, industry noticed the press coverage. Ganymede Games, located in Las Cruces, had been searching for an affordable community with technical talent. The company’s founders saw the website and video and realized that Dona Ana County had the talent they needed. The website also caught the attention of a Taiwanese site selection consultant, who reached the BIA’s Facebook page at 4 a.m. on a Saturday. That led Admiral Cable, a Taiwanese cable manufacturer, to set up operations in Santa Teresa. This connection led Xxentria, a Taiwanese metal panel manufacturer, to announce the opening of locations in Santa Teresa and San Jeronimo. While not directly on the border as we had envisioned for Amazon, Xxentria’s campus is a cross-border campus in spirit. The company is locating their labor-intensive operations in Mexico and their engineering and admin campus in the United States.
We expect more companies to take notice of our binational community as they reexamine their supply chains and consider returning to North America due to the pandemic. The website has evolved into Reshore-NA.com to take advantage of this, focusing on the binational region as a whole. Companies see our vision of the border as an opportunity rather than a barrier. The cross-border campus is still decades away, but we are getting there.